On COPPOLA: film—

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
(TV special), 1991.

* * *

Francis Ford Coppola became the first major American film director to
emerge from a university degree program in filmmaking. He received his
Master of Cinema degree from UCLA in 1968, after submitting his first film
of consequence,
You're a Big Boy Now
(1967), a free-wheeling comedy about a young man on the brink of manhood,
to the university as his master's thesis.

The Rain People
(1969), based on an original scenario of his own, followed in due course.
The plot of this tragic drama concerns a depressed housewife who
impulsively decides to walk out on her family one rainy morning to make a
cross-country trek in her station wagon, in the hope of getting some
perspective on her life. For the first time Coppola's overriding
theme, which centers on the importance of the role of a family spirit in
people's lives, is clearly delineated in one of his films.

Coppola's preoccupation with the importance of family in modern
society is brought into relief in his
Godfather
films, which depict an American family over a period of more than seventy
years. Indeed, the thing that most attracted him to the project in the
first place was the fact that the best-selling book on which the films are
based is really the story of a family. It is about "this father and
his sons," he says,
"and questions of power and succession." In essence,
The Godfather
(1972) offers a chilling depiction of the way in which young Michael
Corleone's loyalty to his flesh-and-blood family gradually turns
into an allegiance to the larger Mafia family to which they in turn
belong—a devotion that in the end renders him a cruel and ruthless
mass murderer. With this film Coppola definitely hit his stride as a
filmmaker, and the picture was an enormous critical and popular success.

The Godfather II
(1974) treats events that happened before and after the action covered in
the first film. The second
Godfather
movie not only chronicles Michael's subsequent career as head of
the "family business," but also presents, in flashback, the
early life of his father in Sicily, as well as his rise to power in the
Mafia in New York City's Little Italy.
The Godfather II
, like
The Godfather
, was a success both with the critics and the public, and Coppola won
Oscars for directing the film, co-authoring the screenplay, and
co-producing the best picture of the year. In 1990 he made his third
Godfather
film. This trilogy of movies, taken together, represents one of the
supreme achievements of the cinematic art.

In contrast to epic films like the
Godfather
series,
The Outsiders
was conceived on a smaller scale; it revolves around a gang of
underprivileged teenage boys growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1960s.
The Outsiders
was a box-office hit, as was
Peggy Sue Got Married
, a remarkable fantasy. The title character is a woman approaching middle
age who passes out at a high-school reunion and wakes up back in high
school in 1960. But she brings with her on her trip down memory lane a
forty-two-year-old mind, and hence views things from a more mature
perspective than she possessed the first time around.

Coppola has made two films about the Vietnam War.
Apocalypse Now
, the first major motion picture about the war, is a king-sized epic shot
on location in the Philippines; and it contains some of the most
extraordinary combat footage ever filmed. But there are no such stunning
battle sequences in its companion film,
Gardens of Stone
, since it takes place state-side, and is concerned with the homefront
during the same period.

His next subject was a biographical film about Preston Tucker, a maverick
automobile designer, titled
Tucker: The Man and His Dream.
Coppola contends that Tucker developed plans for a car that was way ahead
of its time in terms of engineering; yet the auto industry at large
stubbornly resisted his ideas. Unfortunately, Coppola comments, creative
people do not always get a chance to exercise their creativity.

Coppola demonstrated once more that he had mastered his craft in making
Bram Stoker's Dracula.
In it he created a more faithful rendering of the Stoker novel than had
been the case with previous film versions of the celebrated horror tale,
and the film turned out to be a huge critical and popular success. Francis
Coppola is one creative person who has continued to exercise his
considerable talent throughout his career. Admittedly, he has had his
occasional failure, such as the off-center teen movie
Rumble Fish
(1983). But the majority of the films he has directed over the years have
demonstrated that he is one of the most gifted directors to come across
the Hollywood horizon since Stanley Kubrick.

Coppola himself observes that he looks upon the movies he has directed in
the past as providing him with the sort of experience that will help him
to make better films in the future. So the only thing for a filmmaker to
do, he concludes, is to just keep going.

—Gene D. Phillips

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